For most healthcare service providers, the key to maximizing efficiency, and income, is to maximize the number of patient appointments for each business day. To this end, most healthcare service providers schedule an optimum number of appointments for any given business day well in advance. In addition, some healthcare service providers leave openings in their schedules to accommodate emergencies and/or breaks/vacations. However, currently, despite considerable advance planning and efforts to maintain an optimal number of appointments each day, healthcare service providers still often find themselves with inefficient, and costly, appointment free “gaps” during the course of the day. These appointment gaps occur for a variety of reasons. One significant source of appointment gaps is that, particularly in the healthcare services industry, there are a large number of patient cancellations.
Not only are appointment gaps unprofitable and inefficient for healthcare service providers, but they also often represent a significant disservice to other healthcare service consumers, i.e., potential patients, that are often frustrated by the unavailability of appointments with specific healthcare service providers and/or the long waiting periods for an appointment.
In some cases, healthcare service providers try to backfill cancelled appointments, or appointments that have otherwise become available, by scrambling to offer the cancelled appointment time to other patients with later appointments. However, current methods for rescheduling and back-filling cancelled appointments are typically extremely inefficient and involve significant employee time. In addition, current methods for rescheduling and back-filling cancelled appointments are typically done in a hap-hazard manner that rarely is fair and/or even represents any systematic effort to offer the open appointment to the healthcare service consumers who have waited the longest, or have the greatest need. In addition, current methods for rescheduling and back-filling cancelled appointments are typically made by calling a potential fill-in healthcare service consumer and, if the potential fill-in healthcare service consumer does not answer the phone immediately, another potential fill-in healthcare service consumer is called without any follow-up or response time being provided to the first potential fill-in healthcare service consumer.
As a result of the situation described above, current methods for rescheduling and back-filling cancelled appointments are inefficient, arguably unfair, and rarely result in the open appointment actually being filed. In addition, even when the appointment is successfully back-filled, the time and energy involved in rescheduling a replacement healthcare service consumer typically outweighs the gains associated with filling the appointment gap.